My name might as well be Betty MacGyver. I had another baking session cum mad science experiment last week, and the product was a batch of life-giving brownies. I'm actually really proud of myself!
I'd received what some might call a "motherlode" of bake mixes for Christmas (thanks, friends!) and no way to bring them to fruition! Since baking's not really a part of home cooking hereabouts, an extensive search of the department store/grocery turns up about zero baking pans. Ceramic and glass dishes have stickers on them depicting ovens with a big X on top. All salesladies advise against using any other kind of receptacle for baking, no matter how much it looks like Pyrex.
Now, I'm adventurous, but I'm still not about to put just any unknown alloy into my oven and risk ruining a chance to have delicious baked goods. Also, I realized that Man has been baking throughout the ages... uh... possibly since the dawn of time (hey), so if I tried thinking a little "outside the pan," I might be able to solve the problem without shelling out 3000 for a cast-iron skillet.
Not really sure why it didn't come to me sooner, but in the end, I went out and bought a roll of aluminum foil and fashioned my own roughly 8-in cirucular pan while watching a few episodes of Friends. It was awesome fun, and I really can't wait to do it again. And so simple!
Our fridge was still broken and therefore empty, so we had no eggs. I also wasn't willing to buy more than the one egg prescribed on the back of the box, since we had no good way of storing them. Fortunately, Alice's mom rules. She lent me a nice big egg and also took me to the new grocery store for a fresh jug of oil. I got soybean oil, because it seems slightly more novel and cost slightly less money.
The bane of all baking excursions for me is measurement. I am aware that it's mostly my fault for not just buying a measuring cup (there is a 4 cup measuring AND converting cup at the store for a couple hundred). So I wind up spending a lot of time beforehand looking up metric conversion utilities on the internet. Thing is, few companies mark the volume on containers anymore, and for those that do, I'm unsure as to whether it refers to the total volume of the jar/bottle or the actual volume of stuff they had in it. I went ahead and assumed the latter, so that I could rave about it more. There is a Tupperware cup we got for buying too much clothes one day, and that's 470 ml. I didn't really know how to do 1/3 c with that though. I had an idea that my French press might be 8 oz, and that our paper cups might be 4 oz, but after various internet searches failed to confirm either way, I set up a volume lab at the kitchen sink, and did me some interesting mental stoichiometry. I determined that my French press holds 12 c, and then was able to eyeball my liquids and bake some tasty treats.
It was only after everything was in the oven that I realized that my cough medicine came with a cap that measures 1 fluid oz, so I went back to test my hypotheses and discovered that my French press is actually 13 oz and our paper cups are a whopping 6.5 oz or something like that. It really blew my mind how little space an ounce actually takes up.
I know you're probably thinking that I thought about this too much... and I don't have anything to say about that except that you're probably right... but boy did I feel cool.
Then I gained like an inch of fat around my waist from eating too many brownies (although I did share like half the pan with other people, so don't feel too bad for me).
Showing posts with label Baking. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Baking. Show all posts
Monday, March 19, 2007
Tuesday, October 17, 2006
Plus more adventures in food
last night, i dreamt that i was driving in mariokart along with a number of friends. it was sort of macabre.
Also included: baking experiment #1.
Ah, so yesterday was my day off! I sat around for part of the morning as Alice configured her new gmail account, then the two of us went out shopping. It was coooold yesterday! Well, just chilly and very windy. The wind totally sabotaged my outfit and I had to run back upstairs to change. Gangtie Lu (a wide road running E-W) was like one big wind tunnel.
We started out at a "spicy soup" place, as Alice has been calling it. It's funny she does this sort of descriptive translation for me, which is nice, but I swear I can handle the actual Chinese words... it'd be more helpful anyways. I think if I needed to find this sort of food on my own and asked someone for spicy soup, they wouldn't know where to begin. Almost every one of this region's specialties I've encountered so far has revolved around this main idea of spicy soup. Anyways, it's called ma la chuan, and it's the Mongolian BBQ of soup. Anything with the word "chuan"in it involves a skewer, by the way. So we ran across the street to this little restaurant that was incredibly crowded. No seats. We went up to what looked like a set of produce shelves at the supermarket, where there were baskets full of skewered mushrooms, tofu, greens, hot dogs, fish balls, squid, tofu skin, etc. You pick up your own basket and fill it with whatever you want. I went with two things of frozen tofu, sweet potato, yellowish brown mushroom slices, and some big leafy greens. Then up to the counter to pay for it... plus some potato starch noodles and a cold green tea, it all came to... Y7.5? Less than 10 anyway. They gave me a number- 6- and I went with Alice to stake out a seat. We managed to sit down at a counter, but it was not build for people to eat around it, and they were sort of using it to store some vegetables. So we snatched a table after some other people left.
You have to wait a while for everything to boil, but after a while, they bring out a bowl lined in a plastic bag filled with a whitish-yellow broth and a thin orange film of oil on top, assuming you asked for hot sauce, which I so did. You know, it was ok. I think I personally had better last week and a place near the Training Ctr. The broth was barely discernable... the entire thing was just the best spiciest soup ever. Dark red! It was great. I was crying, which is a natural reaction to having that much chili at one time. Ooh!
After that, we ran through the chill to an indoor mall selling nothing but clothes. I got a pretty generic navy track jacket from Eruner. Some nice white racing stripes down the side. And I put it on immediately, over my fleece, cuz it was cold outside.
When we finished there, we went back over to Wangfujing. We go there a lot. Just twice last week for the microwave. We went through the supermarket in the basement for.... baking ingredients! And a bunch of random crap. I always feel like an 8 year old who was asked to do the shopping for her family and buys only junk food and snacks. It's not aaaall junk food, but we're always short on snacks around here. The worst was this really heavy sack of flour.
Then back up to the 5th floor for a toaster oven! I bought a hulk of a toaster oven, a big brushed silver Galanz. It has a rotisserie function. Cost me Y638. We begged the saleslady for free gifts since we are clearly regular customers. She managed to find a set of spice jars and another microwaveable dish (we got two free with our microwave). One of the salesmen gave us a Y500 gift card in exchange for 500 in cash, and then carried everything out to the curb for us. I took the oven and all the groceries in a cab so that Alice could return with the bike.
The first thing I did was whip out an oatmeal raisin (that was originally "oatmean raising" for people who are interested in my disintegrating typing skills) cookie recipe I found online (ok, actually the first thing I did was put two pairs of jeans into the wash, but whatever). People here don't ever bake, so first of all, no one could understand why I wanted to buy such a big expensive oven in the first place.
Here's where the tricks game up though. The recipe called for baking soda. We bought two known leavening agents at the store, assuming one was soda and one was powder, but were unable to tell the difference between the two. I remembered a speech my home ec teacher gave in the 8th grade about what horrible things happen when you accidentally use one instead of the other. I realized that after all the baking I've done, I couldn't remember what one looked like compared to the other. I thought I'd be all clever and Mr. Science-y, and do some simple experiments in my kitchen, but... ok, so both contain NaHCO3, sodium bicarbonate, so both will react if you pour vinegar on them. So getting all excited about that didn't help me one bit. It turns out that baking powder is baking soda already mixed with a dry acid and usually corn starch and will react as it gets wet. So I added water and nothing happened to either. So I felt silly.
One did look more like corn starch than the other, but I didn't know if that was good enough. The internet didn't help a whole lot. On various message boards, some people claimed that xiaoshuda, which I had in a green bag, was baking soda, and on other boards, folks claimed that it was baking powder. I conclude that maybe none of these people actually know. The label on the other bag, a pink one bearing a character I don't recognize but am tempted to pronounce as "cheng" plus a character I do know, mian, is unscrutinized on the internet and didn't show up in Alice's translator. Xiaoshuda came up as "saleratus" which I had to dictionary.com to find out meant baking soda. Buuut, then there was all that other contradictory info. Finally Alice called her mom and came back with the answer, " just use the green one... the pink one you should use only if you're cooking something sour." A hint, yet still more contradictory.
This led me to believe that the green bag was actually full of baking powder, since soda needs an acid added in the recipe to do anything. But I decided to just listen to her mom, even though the recipe called for soda. A quick internet check revealed that various recipes call for one, the other, or both, so I just threw up my hands and went for it.
I mixed everything together in a pot. The recipe... basically functioned as a set of guidelines. The actual portioning of ingredients came entirely out of my ass. For one, it called for a cup of butter, but I only had one smaller-than-usual stick, so... Also, I don't have ANY measuring equipment! So I used a paper cup and what I thought was a teaspoon but which I now believe to be nearly two teaspoons. The recipe called for a massive amount of brown sugar, by the way. So I got to the part about raisins. I had a bag of green raisins that I got from the market a while ago, but when I tasted them it turns out... they're not the kind of raisins that would go into a cookie. So I ran to the fridge and got an apple and chopped that up. In baking the first batch, I discovered that 176ºC is so much hotter than the recipe needed. So I turned it down to about 140º. It looked to me like the bottoms were burning, but it was actually the brown sugar playing tricks on my vision.
I added some coffee grounds to the second batch, because I love coffee grounds in baking. Thanks to one of my kayaking instructors who introduced the idea to me and a Bobby Flay BBQ special for cementing that for me.
So... the outcome... Uh. You know, they're good. I'm happy to eat cookies like this. But there were a few brown sugar lumps that I didn't get to, so every once in a while you get this molasses burst that can be a little creepy if you're not prepared. Also, here and there you get a bite that's almost... savory? but not in a bad way. So I dunno. What I've determined is that the oven works. It's just execution that needs to be cleaned up a bit.
Alice's two friends were over by the time I finished, and the four of us went out for hotpot. This meal lasted for way too long. One of her friends met several of his there, and we couldn't leave until they were finished talking. In the meantime, the other three of us chewed gum and I dissected most of the larger floating spices in the soup and composed a portrait out of the leftovers. You know hotpot by now. This place does it pretty well and gives you a choice of two broths-- I thought it was called xiaofeiyang (little fat sheep/goat), but it seems like it's actually called something else. There are two giant statues of adorable goats in mongolian garb pulling noodles outside though, and I really want to climb one some night after I get a new camera. Very busy that night-- one very celebratory party at two large tables directly to our left, so...
Afterwards, they wanted to go to the internet cafe, so I went along. Spent most of my time reading around NYtimes and National Geographic and they played a Mariokart-esque racing game (hence my dream). We were there until 12, when most of the lights were turned off. By then I really had to pee and even my skin smelled like smoke. Alice and I took a cab home, where, unable to really account for anything I wanted to do, I did dishes, showered, and went to bed.
Ta da!
Also included: baking experiment #1.
Ah, so yesterday was my day off! I sat around for part of the morning as Alice configured her new gmail account, then the two of us went out shopping. It was coooold yesterday! Well, just chilly and very windy. The wind totally sabotaged my outfit and I had to run back upstairs to change. Gangtie Lu (a wide road running E-W) was like one big wind tunnel.
We started out at a "spicy soup" place, as Alice has been calling it. It's funny she does this sort of descriptive translation for me, which is nice, but I swear I can handle the actual Chinese words... it'd be more helpful anyways. I think if I needed to find this sort of food on my own and asked someone for spicy soup, they wouldn't know where to begin. Almost every one of this region's specialties I've encountered so far has revolved around this main idea of spicy soup. Anyways, it's called ma la chuan, and it's the Mongolian BBQ of soup. Anything with the word "chuan"in it involves a skewer, by the way. So we ran across the street to this little restaurant that was incredibly crowded. No seats. We went up to what looked like a set of produce shelves at the supermarket, where there were baskets full of skewered mushrooms, tofu, greens, hot dogs, fish balls, squid, tofu skin, etc. You pick up your own basket and fill it with whatever you want. I went with two things of frozen tofu, sweet potato, yellowish brown mushroom slices, and some big leafy greens. Then up to the counter to pay for it... plus some potato starch noodles and a cold green tea, it all came to... Y7.5? Less than 10 anyway. They gave me a number- 6- and I went with Alice to stake out a seat. We managed to sit down at a counter, but it was not build for people to eat around it, and they were sort of using it to store some vegetables. So we snatched a table after some other people left.
You have to wait a while for everything to boil, but after a while, they bring out a bowl lined in a plastic bag filled with a whitish-yellow broth and a thin orange film of oil on top, assuming you asked for hot sauce, which I so did. You know, it was ok. I think I personally had better last week and a place near the Training Ctr. The broth was barely discernable... the entire thing was just the best spiciest soup ever. Dark red! It was great. I was crying, which is a natural reaction to having that much chili at one time. Ooh!
After that, we ran through the chill to an indoor mall selling nothing but clothes. I got a pretty generic navy track jacket from Eruner. Some nice white racing stripes down the side. And I put it on immediately, over my fleece, cuz it was cold outside.
When we finished there, we went back over to Wangfujing. We go there a lot. Just twice last week for the microwave. We went through the supermarket in the basement for.... baking ingredients! And a bunch of random crap. I always feel like an 8 year old who was asked to do the shopping for her family and buys only junk food and snacks. It's not aaaall junk food, but we're always short on snacks around here. The worst was this really heavy sack of flour.
Then back up to the 5th floor for a toaster oven! I bought a hulk of a toaster oven, a big brushed silver Galanz. It has a rotisserie function. Cost me Y638. We begged the saleslady for free gifts since we are clearly regular customers. She managed to find a set of spice jars and another microwaveable dish (we got two free with our microwave). One of the salesmen gave us a Y500 gift card in exchange for 500 in cash, and then carried everything out to the curb for us. I took the oven and all the groceries in a cab so that Alice could return with the bike.
The first thing I did was whip out an oatmeal raisin (that was originally "oatmean raising" for people who are interested in my disintegrating typing skills) cookie recipe I found online (ok, actually the first thing I did was put two pairs of jeans into the wash, but whatever). People here don't ever bake, so first of all, no one could understand why I wanted to buy such a big expensive oven in the first place.
Here's where the tricks game up though. The recipe called for baking soda. We bought two known leavening agents at the store, assuming one was soda and one was powder, but were unable to tell the difference between the two. I remembered a speech my home ec teacher gave in the 8th grade about what horrible things happen when you accidentally use one instead of the other. I realized that after all the baking I've done, I couldn't remember what one looked like compared to the other. I thought I'd be all clever and Mr. Science-y, and do some simple experiments in my kitchen, but... ok, so both contain NaHCO3, sodium bicarbonate, so both will react if you pour vinegar on them. So getting all excited about that didn't help me one bit. It turns out that baking powder is baking soda already mixed with a dry acid and usually corn starch and will react as it gets wet. So I added water and nothing happened to either. So I felt silly.
One did look more like corn starch than the other, but I didn't know if that was good enough. The internet didn't help a whole lot. On various message boards, some people claimed that xiaoshuda, which I had in a green bag, was baking soda, and on other boards, folks claimed that it was baking powder. I conclude that maybe none of these people actually know. The label on the other bag, a pink one bearing a character I don't recognize but am tempted to pronounce as "cheng" plus a character I do know, mian, is unscrutinized on the internet and didn't show up in Alice's translator. Xiaoshuda came up as "saleratus" which I had to dictionary.com to find out meant baking soda. Buuut, then there was all that other contradictory info. Finally Alice called her mom and came back with the answer, " just use the green one... the pink one you should use only if you're cooking something sour." A hint, yet still more contradictory.
This led me to believe that the green bag was actually full of baking powder, since soda needs an acid added in the recipe to do anything. But I decided to just listen to her mom, even though the recipe called for soda. A quick internet check revealed that various recipes call for one, the other, or both, so I just threw up my hands and went for it.
I mixed everything together in a pot. The recipe... basically functioned as a set of guidelines. The actual portioning of ingredients came entirely out of my ass. For one, it called for a cup of butter, but I only had one smaller-than-usual stick, so... Also, I don't have ANY measuring equipment! So I used a paper cup and what I thought was a teaspoon but which I now believe to be nearly two teaspoons. The recipe called for a massive amount of brown sugar, by the way. So I got to the part about raisins. I had a bag of green raisins that I got from the market a while ago, but when I tasted them it turns out... they're not the kind of raisins that would go into a cookie. So I ran to the fridge and got an apple and chopped that up. In baking the first batch, I discovered that 176ºC is so much hotter than the recipe needed. So I turned it down to about 140º. It looked to me like the bottoms were burning, but it was actually the brown sugar playing tricks on my vision.
I added some coffee grounds to the second batch, because I love coffee grounds in baking. Thanks to one of my kayaking instructors who introduced the idea to me and a Bobby Flay BBQ special for cementing that for me.
So... the outcome... Uh. You know, they're good. I'm happy to eat cookies like this. But there were a few brown sugar lumps that I didn't get to, so every once in a while you get this molasses burst that can be a little creepy if you're not prepared. Also, here and there you get a bite that's almost... savory? but not in a bad way. So I dunno. What I've determined is that the oven works. It's just execution that needs to be cleaned up a bit.
Alice's two friends were over by the time I finished, and the four of us went out for hotpot. This meal lasted for way too long. One of her friends met several of his there, and we couldn't leave until they were finished talking. In the meantime, the other three of us chewed gum and I dissected most of the larger floating spices in the soup and composed a portrait out of the leftovers. You know hotpot by now. This place does it pretty well and gives you a choice of two broths-- I thought it was called xiaofeiyang (little fat sheep/goat), but it seems like it's actually called something else. There are two giant statues of adorable goats in mongolian garb pulling noodles outside though, and I really want to climb one some night after I get a new camera. Very busy that night-- one very celebratory party at two large tables directly to our left, so...
Afterwards, they wanted to go to the internet cafe, so I went along. Spent most of my time reading around NYtimes and National Geographic and they played a Mariokart-esque racing game (hence my dream). We were there until 12, when most of the lights were turned off. By then I really had to pee and even my skin smelled like smoke. Alice and I took a cab home, where, unable to really account for anything I wanted to do, I did dishes, showered, and went to bed.
Ta da!
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